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In English Language Learner, people answer questions referring to English by English.

Analogue to this, can I answer questions in the site by Chinese?

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    The description is "for students, teachers, and linguists" so you can answer in Chinese if you feel the person asking would understand. Otherwise use English.
    – amateur
    Feb 20, 2014 at 10:21
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    @amateur: Actually the main purpose of Stack Exchange and reason for it existing is not to help the person who posted the question, but to help all the other people with a similar question who find the sites by doing a search in Google etc. The best posts are the ones useful for a wider audience than just the OP.
    – hippietrail
    Feb 20, 2014 at 10:32
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    See "Should I post in English or Chinese?" in the help center.
    – Stan
    Feb 20, 2014 at 10:56
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    @Stan - That was written by someone higher up and on our site it is actually required to have all questions and answers to be written predominantly in English. It has always been the standard and always been the moderator approach (see 99% of questions and answer on the site to date). The idea being as per hippitrail's comment above that the majority of people (predominantly English speakers learning Chinese) can understand regardless of their skill level.
    – going
    Mar 3, 2014 at 5:00
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    @xiaohouzi79 I totally agree with you and hippietrail. To be more friendly to new visitors, maybe that rule in the help center should be updated. So next time when I cite that rule, the statement can be clearer.
    – Stan
    Mar 3, 2014 at 7:37

2 Answers 2

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I think we should allow both questions and answers in both English and Chinese.

I know I wasn't here when the site was proposed so I'm not sure what the original idea was. But I was active on the early Spanish site and they wanted to cater both to Spanish learners via English and Spanish speakers who wanted to learn more about their language, much like on English Language & Usage.

I'm no longer active on Spanish but at one point we decided it was OK to ask or answer in either language and we would welcome contributors' edits to provide translations into the other language in such posts.

The way we did at was simply to add a horizontal divide at the bottom of the question or answer with --- so it would divide it into two halves. In the second half you would translate as accurately as you could without changing the formatting or anything else in the original question.

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  • For non-Chinese people to understand it well, we'd better explain some very important part in English so as to let them understand well.
    – xqMogvKW
    Feb 24, 2014 at 6:51
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of course you can. we will answer you in chinese as well

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